Growing from a community that wanted more from their operating system, the Nexenta operating system is designed by those who wish to include the greatest power of the Unix platform, with the ease of use of Ubuntu, and the polish of Microsoft Windows.

The core supporters of Nexenta would probably rail against the portrayal of the user interface as having anything in common with Windows, but instead would describe the polished interface as the very best view of the X Window manager, and some design takes from the Next OS of Steve Jobs.

Whatever the description, the operating system tries to build a modern Unix on the core of OpenSolaris, the operating system developed by Sun.  On top of the Sun kernel, the Zetta File System promises to be the best thing to happen to file storage since the hard disk.  The file system allows for ease of use only seen in science fiction novels. Allowing almost unfathomable storage, all realistic limits on total storage have been lifted, and much of the benefit of a ’self-healing’ file system are incorporated.

The ancillary files included are all of the well-known utilities included with every modern Linux distribution. These GNU utilities are the same as those included in the Debian and Ubuntu distributions that are so popular.

Although not part of the Debian Project, movement is being planned for inclusion in that database of packages. The basic system contains Apache, MySQL, Perl/Python/PHP, Firefox, Evolution, software update manager, Synaptic package manager, Gaim Instant Messenger, abiword, administration & development utilities, editors, graphics, GNOME, interpreters, libraries and many others.

Screenshots of this excellent choice of operating system are available, showing how this third major change in the thought of open source Unix looks and works. For the newest to this party, the first and second changes were the BSD OS’s [FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD] and the many Linux distributions [Ubuntu, SuSe, Fedora, Yellow Dog, Debian, Red Hat, etc].

Tags: nexentaos, bsd os, solaris, zfs, x windows, next os, debian, ubuntu, gnu